The present invention relates to computed tomography (CT) imaging apparatus; and more particularly, to reducing the x-ray dose applied to a patient without significantly increasing noise artifacts in the image.
In a computed tomography system, an x-ray source projects a fan-shaped beam which is collimated to lie within an X-Y plane of a Cartesian coordinate system, termed the "imaging plane." The x-ray beam passes through the object being imaged, such as a medical patient, and impinges upon an array of radiation detectors. The intensity of the transmitted radiation is dependent upon the attenuation of the x-ray beam by the object and each detector produces a separate electrical signal that is a measurement of the beam attenuation. The attenuation measurements from all the detectors are acquired separately to produce the transmission profile.
The source and detector array in a conventional CT system are rotated on a gantry within the imaging plane and around the object so that the angle at which the x-ray beam intersects the object constantly changes. A group of x-ray attenuation measurements from the detector array at a given angle is referred to as a "view" and a "scan" of the object comprises a set of views made at different angular orientations during one or more revolutions of the x-ray source and detector. In a 2D scan, data is processed to construct an image that corresponds to a two dimensional slice taken through the object. The prevailing method for reconstructing an image from 2D data is referred to in the art as the filtered backprojection technique. This process converts the attenuation measurements from a scan into integers called "CT numbers" or "Hounsfield units", which are used to control the brightness of a corresponding pixel on a cathode ray tube display.
Quantum noise degrades the diagnostic quality of a CT image and this noise is related to the amount of x-rays, or "dose", employed to acquire the attenuation measurements, and to the attenuation characteristics of the patient. Image artifacts due to noise will increase if the x-rays measured at the detector drop to low levels either because the prescribed x-ray dose is too low or the beam is highly attenuated by patient anatomy. The x-ray dose is controlled by the current ("mA") applied to the x-ray tube, and the practice is to fix this current at a level which provides a constant dose during the entire scan. If the operator prescribes a high dose, image quality is superb throughout, but excessive x-ray flux is produced during portions of the scan when patient attenuation is low. The patient is thus exposed to an excessive dose and the x-ray tube is unnecessarily heated. On the other hand, if the dose is reduced (to prevent tube overheating during the prescribed scan), noise artifacts will appear in the image oriented at locations where the beam is highly attenuated. For example, horizontal streaks may appear in slices through a patient's shoulders and hips.
In the above-cited co-pending application, a modulation profile for use in scanning a patient with minimal dose and a clinically insignificant noise increase is calculated. A transverse slice through a patient may be viewed radiologically as an oval shape having major and minor axes which change along the length of the patient. For example, at the hips the major axis is horizontal and much longer than the vertical minor axis, whereas at the neck, the major axis is vertical and only a little longer than the minor axis. At other locations the radiological profile may be nearly circular. A general purpose modulation template having a substantially sinusoidal shape at twice the frequency of the gantry rotation may be automatically tailored to such radiological profiles by acquiring during a "scout" scan two orthogonal views through the transverse slice prior to the scan. This information is employed to produce a modulation profile from the sinusoidal template.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for the x-ray tube and generator to modulate the x-ray dose below a certain level during a scan. Cycling the tube current over a large current range can lead to thermal fatigue of the x-ray tube filament and increasing the response time of the closed current control loop in the generator in order to achieve deeper modulation increases the instability of the closed tube voltage control loop. In addition, the shape of the modulation waveform actually produced at higher modulation levels is not consistent between tube/generator combinations. As a result, potential dose reduction is not fully realized in situations that allow modulation of the dose below this practical limit.